Contagious: Why Things Catch On (14 page)

It was.

Understanding arousal helps integrate the different results we had found so far. Anger and anxiety lead people to share because, like awe, they are high-arousal emotions. They kindle the fire, activate people, and drive them to take action.

Arousal is also one reason funny things get shared. Videos about the aftereffects of a kid having anesthesia at the dentist (“David After Dentist”), a baby biting his brother’s finger (“Charlie Bit My Finger—Again!”), or a unicorn going to Candy Mountain and getting his kidney stolen (“Charlie the Unicorn”) are some of the most popular on YouTube. Taken together they have been viewed more than 600 million times.

But while it is tempting to say that these things went viral simply because they are funny, a more fundamental process is at work. Think about the last time you heard a really hilarious joke or were forwarded a humorous clip and felt compelled to pass it along. Just like inspiring things, or those that make us angry,
funny content is shared because amusement is a high-arousal emotion.

Low-arousal emotions, however, like sadness, decrease sharing. Contentment has the same effect. Contentment isn’t a bad feeling. Being content feels pretty good. But people are less likely to talk about or share things that make them content because contentment decreases arousal.

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United Airlines learned the hard way that arousal can drive people to share. Dave Carroll was a pretty good musician. His group, Sons of Maxwell, wasn’t a blockbuster act, but they made enough money from album sales, touring, and merchandising to pull together a decent living. People weren’t tattooing Dave’s name on their arms, but he was doing all right.

While traveling to a gig in Nebraska, Dave and his band had to take a connecting flight through Chicago with United Airlines. It’s hard enough to find overhead space for even a small carry-on, but musicians have it even tougher. Dave’s group couldn’t fit their guitars in the overhead, so they had to check them with the rest of their baggage.

But as they were about to deplane at O’Hare Airport, a woman cried out, “My god, they’re throwing guitars out there!” Dave looked out the window in horror just in time to see the baggage handlers roughly tossing his treasured instruments through the air.

He jumped up and pleaded with the flight attendant for help, but to no avail. One flight attendant told him to talk to the lead agent, but that agent said it wasn’t her responsibility. Another employee gave him the run-around and told him to take up the matter with the gate agent when he landed in his final destination.

When Dave landed in Omaha at 12:30 a.m., he found the airport deserted. No employees in sight.

Dave made his way to baggage claim and carefully opened his guitar case. His worst fears were confirmed. His $3,500 guitar had been smashed.

But that was only the start of Dave’s story. He spent the next nine months negotiating with United for some kind of compensation. He filed a claim asking United to fix the guitar, but
it denied his request. Among a long list of justifications, United argued that it couldn’t help him because he had missed the brief twenty-four-hour window for claiming damages described in the small print of his ticket.

Furious with the way he’d been treated, Dave channeled his emotions the way any good musician would: he wrote a song about it. He described his experience, put it to music, and posted it as a short clip on YouTube entitled “United Breaks Guitars.”

Within twenty-four hours of uploading the video, he’d received almost 500 comments, most of them from other angry United customers who’d had similar experiences. In less than four days the video had more than 1.3 million views. Within ten days, more than 3 million views and 14,000 comments. In December 2009,
Time
magazine listed “United Breaks Guitars” as one of the Top 10 Viral Videos of 2009.

United appears to have felt the negative effects almost immediately. Within four days of the video being posted, its stock price fell 10 percent—the equivalent of $180 million. Although United eventually donated $3,000 to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz as a “gesture of goodwill,” many industry observers felt that it suffered permanent damage as a result of the incident.

FOCUS ON FEELINGS

Marketing messages tend to focus on information. Public health officials note how much healthier teens will be if they don’t smoke or if they eat more vegetables. People think that if they just lay out the facts in a clear and concise way, it will tip the scales. Their audience will pay attention, weigh the information, and act accordingly.

But many times information is not enough. Most teens don’t
smoke because they think it’s good for them. And most people who scarf down a Big Mac and large fries and wash it down with a supersized Coke are not oblivious to the health risks. So additional information probably won’t get them to change their behavior. They need something more.

And that is where emotion comes in. Rather than harping on features or facts, we need to focus on feelings; the underlying emotions that motivate people to action.

Some products or ideas may seem better suited than others for evoking emotion. It seems easier to get people excited about a new, hip lounge than logistics management. Pets and babies seem to lend themselves to emotional appeals more than banking or nonprofit financial strategy does.

But any product or service can focus on feelings, even those that don’t possess any obvious emotional hook.

Take online search engines. Search engines seem like one of the least emotional products you can think of. People want the most accurate search results in the least time possible. And underneath those results is a tangle of confusing technology: link weighting, indexing, and PageRank algorithms. A difficult product to get people fired up or teary eyed about, right?

Well, Google did exactly that with its “Parisian Love” campaign.

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When Anthony Cafaro graduated from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2009, he wasn’t expecting to become a Googler. No one from Visual Arts had gone to work for Google before, and the company was known as a place for techies, not designers. But when Cafaro learned Google was interviewing graphic-design graduates, he thought he’d give it a shot.

The interview was a blast. By the end, the interviewers seemed less like examiners and more like old friends. Cafaro turned down a slew of offers from traditional ad agencies to join a newly formed Google design team called the Creative Lab.

After a few months, though, Anthony realized that the Creative Lab’s approach wasn’t exactly in line with the company’s overall ethos. Great graphic design is visceral. Like art, it moves people and evokes their innermost feelings. But Google was about analytics, not emotion.

In a telling story, a designer once suggested using a certain shade of blue for the toolbar based on its visual appeal. But the product manager resisted using the color, asking the designer to justify that choice with quantitative research. At Google, colors aren’t just colors, they’re mathematical decisions.

The same issues came up in one of Cafaro’s first projects. The Creative Lab was asked to create content to highlight the functionality of Google’s new search interface. Features like finding flights, autocorrect, and language translation. One potential solution was a little tutorial on how to search better. A how-to of the different functions. Another was “A Google a Day,” an online trivia game that involved using search features to solve complex puzzles.

Cafaro liked both ideas but felt something was missing. Emotion.

Google had a great interface and useful search results, but an interface doesn’t make you laugh. An interface doesn’t make you cry. A demo would show how the interface worked, but that would be it. Cafaro wanted to humanize the interface. He wanted not only to show features, but to move people. Build an emotional connection.

So together with the Creative Lab team, Cafaro developed a
video entitled “Parisian Love.”
The clip tells a budding love story, using Google searches that evolve over time. No images of people, or even voices—just the phrases entered in the search bar and the results that emerge.

It starts when a guy enters “study abroad Paris France” and clicks on one of the top search results to learn more. Later he searches for “cafés near the Louvre,” and scans to find one he thinks he’ll like. You hear a female laugh in the background as his next entry is “translate tu es très mignon,” which he soon learns is French for “you are very cute.” Quickly he then seeks advice on how to “impress a French girl,” reads up on the suggestions, and searches for chocolate shops in Paris.

The music builds as the plot unfolds. We follow the searcher as he transitions from seeking long-distance relationship advice to job hunting in Paris. We see him tracking a plane’s landing time and then searching for Paris churches (to the accompaniment of church bells in the background). Finally, as the music crescendos, we see him asking how to assemble a crib. The video ends with a simple message. “Search on.”

You cannot watch this clip without having your heartstrings tugged. It’s romantic, joyous, and inspiring all at once. I still feel tingles every time I see it, and I’ve watched it dozens of times.

When the Creative Lab presented the clip to the Google Search marketing team, everyone loved it. Google’s CEO’s wife loved it. Everyone wanted to pass it on. In fact, the clip did so well internally that Google decided to release it to the larger public. By focusing on feelings, Google turned a normal ad into a viral hit.

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It doesn’t require a costly ad agency or millions of dollars in focus groups to get people to feel emotion. Cafaro created the clip
with four other students who had been brought in from design programs across the country. Rather than simply highlighting the latest gee-whiz feature, Cafaro’s team reminded people what they love about Google Search. As one Creative Lab team member put it, “
The best results don’t show up in a search engine, they show up in people’s lives.” Well said.

In their wonderful book
Made to Stick
, Chip and Dan Heath talk about using the “Three Whys” to find the emotional core of an idea. Write down why you think people are doing something. Then ask “Why is this important?” three times. Each time you do this, note your answer, and you’ll notice that you drill down further and further toward uncovering not only the core of an idea, but the emotion behind it.

Take online search. Why is search important? Because people want to find information quickly.

Why do they want to do that? So they can get answers to what they are looking for.

Why do they want those answers? So they can connect with people, achieve their goals, and fulfill their dreams. Now that’s starting to get more emotional.

Want people to talk about global warming and rally to change it? Don’t just point out how big the problem is or list key statistics. Figure out how to make them care. Talk about polar bears dying or how their children’s health will be affected.

KINDLING THE FIRE WITH HIGH-AROUSAL EMOTIONS

When trying to use emotions to drive sharing, remember to pick ones that kindle the fire: select high-arousal emotions that drive people to action.

On the positive side, excite people or inspire them by showing
them how they can make a difference. On the negative side, make people mad, not sad. Make sure the polar bear story gets them fired up.

Simply adding more arousal to a story or ad can have a big impact on people’s willingness to share it. In one experiment we changed the details of a story to make it evoke more anger. In another experiment, we made an ad funnier.

In both cases, the results were the same. More anger or more humor led to more sharing. Adding these emotions boosted transmission by boosting the amount of arousal the story or ad evoked.

Negative emotions can also drive people to talk and share. Marketing messages usually try to paint products and ideas in the most positive light possible. From razors to refrigerators, ads typically show smiling customers who extol the benefits they derive from using the product. Marketers tend to avoid negative emotions out of fear they could taint the brand.

But if used correctly, negative emotions can actually boost word of mouth.

BMW kindled the fire beautifully in a 2001 campaign. The German automobile company created a series of short Internet films entitled
The Hire.
Rather than being typical feel-good commercials showing BMWs driving down various idyllic country roads, the movies were riddled with kidnappings, FBI raids, and near-death experiences. While the fear and anxiety they evoked were far from positive, the clips so highly aroused viewers that the series racked up more than 11 million views within four months. Over the same period, BMW sales increased 12 percent.

Or consider public health messages. It’s often hard to put a positive spin on things when you’re trying to get people to realize that smoking causes lung cancer, or that
obesity reduces life expectancy by more than three years. But certain types of negative
emotional appeals should be more effective in getting people to spread the word than others.

Think back to the “Man Drinks Fat” public service announcement we talked about in the Triggers chapter. A huge glob of white fat plopping down on a plate? Gross! But because
disgust is a highly arousing emotion, it encouraged people to talk about and share the PSA. Designing messages that make people anxious or disgusted (high arousal) rather than sad (low arousal) will boost transmission. Negative emotions, when used correctly, can be a powerful driver of discussion.

And that brings us to babywearing.

BABYWEARING, BOYCOTTS, AND BLUNTING BAD BUZZ

The year 2008 had many firsts. The first time China hosted the Olympics, the first African American elected president of the United States, and one that you might not have been aware of. The inaugural celebration of International Babywearing Week.

The practice of carrying your baby in a sling or similar carrier has been around for thousands of years. Some experts have even argued that
the practice strengthens the maternal bond, improving the health of the baby and the mother. But as strollers and other gadgets have been popularized, many parents have moved away from this practice. So in 2008, a celebration was held to raise awareness and encourage people around the world to reconsider the benefits of babywearing.